


Vanishing Act

by Timeskipped



Category: A3! (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Neglect, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:47:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23994742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timeskipped/pseuds/Timeskipped
Summary: “I'm looking for my father. All I know is that he has an acting company around here.”(After things fall apart, Mankai Company's new manager meets a teenage girl.)
Kudos: 41





	Vanishing Act

**Author's Note:**

> This is how I cope with the little info we've been given about Yukio pre-Act 3, and how it's coming out around Matsukawa's birthday. Oops.

There's a girl staring at Isuke as the sun sets.

She can't be more than sixteen, but Isuke doesn’t really know how to tell her exact age, so maybe he's wrong. Her long brown hair is tied up in a high ponytail, and her eyes are boring into him in a way that makes him deeply uncomfortable.

He clears his throat. “Excuse me, can I help you…?” he asks weakly, clasping the flyers he holds tightly to his chest. He grabs one, the edge scraping against one of the band-aids on his fingertips, the ones he keeps with him for when he gets paper cuts from these same flyers.

“Ah,” she seems to startle a little, “I'm sorry, you, uh, looked a little familiar. But I don't… _think_ I've met you before. Sorry.” She bows her head with the apology, as if anticipating that he'll tell her that he knows her well.

“I don't know you either. But I'm pretty good at blending in, so maybe you just didn’t notice me fully!” He holds out the flyer, and her eyes fall on it when she looks back up. “Here! I'm with the Mankai Company!”

Her eyes widen. “You're with a theater company? Do you know about some of the companies in the area?!”

Isuke is caught off guard by that. He only recently became in charge of Mankai, and he hadn’t exactly researched Veludo Way companies even when he _wasn’t._ He smiles awkwardly at her. “No,” he says, then realizes belatedly what asking about it could mean. “Are you looking to join one? We have open space in our dorms, too! You can move in as soon as you'd like!”

He can feel the desperation straining his voice, pitching it higher and higher. It's for this reason that Isuke’s been out all day, handing out flyers, mostly ignored due to not having any street act to go with it.

There are barely any actors to do them, either. Everything is falling apart, but this girl—this girl!—could save them.

She blinks, holding up a hand as he steps closer to her, hoping for an answer with nerves tied tightly in his chest. “Wait, don't you need parental permission for a minor—? Actually, nevermind. What's important is that I'm looking for my, ah...” her gaze drops to the street, where long shadows gather at her feet.

“Your...?”

She smiles, but Isuke can tell that it's not all genuine. His heart sinks. “My father. All I know is that he has an acting company around here. He really loves acting, but I'm pretty bad at it myself,” she smiles, and it's oddly charming, despite the self deprecating edge.

“I see...” Isuke says, stepping back, not sure how to feel about the girl’s hesitance, or how she just admitted that she barely knows her father's work, enough to ask a stranger like him about it. “I don't know any theater company owners with kids.”

Well, he did know Yukio, but since he'd disappeared, most Mankai members who bothered to talk about it came to the conclusion that he'd gone back to his wife and daughter. It made sense, because the daughter hadn’t seen her father for way too long, considering how Yukio slept at the dorms most nights, and… well, even if it stung somewhere deep in his chest, it wasn't like Isuke had any better ideas, because even _he_ would dismiss the kidnapping theories.

The girl smiles and shakes her head, making her long ponytail move back and forth. Something about her seems familiar, now that Isuke is thinking about Yukio—the color of her hair, maybe. It's just like the girl had said, though, that they'd probably seen each other in a crowd and forgotten until this moment.

“That's okay.” Her eyes are a cool brown, but the sun makes them look pink as she smiles. Somehow, it breaks Isuke’s heart that he isn’t able to help her. “I'll take one of those flyers; maybe I'll come see a show sometime.”

“Please do!” Isuke cheers as she takes one of his many, many flyers. “But if you ever want to try acting again, I'm sure we could use even actors who are, um, uh,” he scrambles for a nice way to say _bad,_ “unpolished!”

The girl laughs. “Okay,” she says. “I'll keep it in mind.”

Isuke ends up back in the dorms that night, turning on the lights with one hand and keeping his flyers clutched in the other. He hadn’t given enough out, and they don't even have a director for their next show either way.

His heart clenches painfully, sucking the energy out of his limbs.

Isuke is a failure. A failure for not keeping the troupes there, a failure for letting the only ones who understood what Mankai meant to them leave, a failure for losing all this money…

He ends up sinking to the ground, staring at his fingers, bandaged from all his worthless effort. Everything feels like too much, at this moment, an endless pressure weighing down on his shoulders when he isn't used to the responsibility. It chokes up his lungs, and he presses his back against the wall, as if that would stop it from happening.

He wants to go back to when it was easy. Back to when Isuke was barely a new member, and everyone smiled happily with him. Isuke had been to nervous to even speak, sometimes, blended in too much even as he tried again and again to give a helping hand to the other members, but—

At least back then they'd all been together.

* * *

Izumi Tachibana closes the door quietly and calls out to her mother that she’s home, ending up in her room with little fanfare.

The day was a failure, she thinks, staring at the flyer in her hand. It’s badly designed, but she supposes that it doesn't matter; it’s kind of charming in it’s own way, but Izumi doubts she’ll actually end up going to their plays. She’s been too caught up in her own head these days, asking around Veludo Way for any hint of her father, since the police couldn’t find anything.

Izumi doesn’t know why she’s doing this. She thinks she should stop, but for some reason she can’t help herself, not when she knows that her father loved acting so much. Izumi can't help but think that he wouldn’t leave it forever. Maybe. She’s not completely sure.

Izumi doesn’t even know what her father thinks of her. She doesn’t know what he’d say if he saw her. She doesn’t know why he vanished. How can she know anything about her father’s life when she doesn’t even know the name of his theater company?

Her mother would know.

Izumi shoves Mankai Company’s flyer into a drawer full of useless things she’ll inevitably throw out—she doesn’t want to ask her mother, doesn’t want her to know that she’s been searching. Her mother is on the verge of not caring for him, and Izumi doesn’t want to know which side her mother will fall on in the end. Even if it means searching a little harder, Izumi will keep this to herself until she unavoidably gives up.

With any luck, _giving up_ will mean acceptance more than despair. If she keeps acting, even if she never sees her father again, she’ll find a road that leads to happiness. Maybe at the end of this road will be a place full of flowers, and a family that would never disappear into thin air.

In the end, that’s all Izumi can hope for.


End file.
